


What Remains When Disbelief Has Gone

by regalmilk



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan)
Genre: M/M, Mild Gore, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-14 17:15:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18480730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regalmilk/pseuds/regalmilk
Summary: As he treks through the snowy Himalayan slopes, the dawn around him is grey, embroidered with a strand of pink flame. The wind is a faint whistle through bared teeth. It punctuates the deafening silence over the frozen white corpse of the hills. He imagines Ra’s mocking him.‘Bruce Waynewouldthink the world retains its shape for him, that a natural phenomenon would arise from nothing just to preserve the proof of his existence.’Maybe he wants to carve his face up too. Maybe he always did.(Set after the events of The Dark Knight Rises)





	What Remains When Disbelief Has Gone

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the poem "Church Going" by Philip Larkin

He does not return to Gotham after the bomb. In the aftermath of the ejection, he only remembers the explosion as a collage of sensory fragments. A bloom of light, the depths of the water—devouring the sound of it like a starved animal. He sees fire beneath the surface of the bay. His mother’s pearls. Rachel. Selina’s red lipstick on a champagne flute. Fire. The ground Alfred stood upon as he once told him there was a breed of criminal the latter did not fully understand. The ground he himself stood upon as Ra’s swept him under the ice. Fire. The snap of his own spine, making him human for the third time in his life. That laugh. Fire.

He thinks, with what little consciousness will afford him, that he wouldn’t mind if death found him now.

But death wants nothing to do with him.

Gotham is a place for Bruce Wayne, perhaps even Batman, in some distant unfillable sense. But it is no place for a ghost.

He spends a few nameless days plagued with nausea in the Narrows, and then a span of several weeks in various hotels. He spreads his cash around, wears dark glasses, and they don’t ask questions. He draws the curtains over the city smog and hears a newscaster read out a list of GCPD officers who were killed in Bane’s razing of Gotham. The broadcast cuts to a live feed of Detective Ramirez, who issues a statement on the attack’s ramifications to the GCPD. She mentions a handful of officers who’ve tendered their resignations, and he thinks he hears the name ‘John Blake’, but he can’t be sure. He only processes her voice in the tight pauses when he gasps and clings to the bowl, before his stomach purges itself again.

When he finds the strength to stagger back into the bedroom and shut off the TV, its final announcement sounds more like a provocation: “Since his escape from Arkham during the city-wide crisis, the Joker’s whereabouts remain unknown.”

He takes a ferry to the mainland. Out of the city. He knows he’s manufactured a smile too wide though, when a woman on the boat clenches the railing too tightly. Too reflexively.  He watches her face slowly blanch and her eyes betray themselves with recognition. The bridges, the bay, the monument.

He slips her several dozen hundreds when the boat pulls into the harbor. He hadn’t counted them. That fake smile again, stretching like a latex glove over his face.

“Keep the change. And tell whoever you want.”

 

Because he is gone.

The earth feels less beneath his feet.

—

As he treks through the snowy Himalayan slopes, the dawn around him is grey, embroidered with a strand of pink flame. The wind is a faint whistle through bared teeth. It punctuates the deafening silence over the frozen white corpse of the hills. He imagines Ra’s mocking him.

_‘I could have told you that you would come back here to die. You’re no less predictable than a salmon, returning to the place of its birth.’_

He could have told himself the same. “Except I’m not going here to fuck.”

—

When he reaches the tiny village in the foothills, the wind running through strings of faded prayer flags like invisible fingers through hair, he realizes how little has changed.

Some of the locals pass by his periphery. A woman, thick with beautiful wrinkles and bowed like an ox, stoops with a basket of rice. A man with black eyes and his grandson sit upon the steps outside their painted door.

The man with black eyes looks at him. Bruce wonders at the rivered lines around his lips. Wonders how many stories in how many years his mouth has told.

These people have never needed Batman. These people have never needed Bruce Wayne. Time has both ravaged and ignored them, and they are no worse off for it. When he had first ascended these slopes, nearly two decades ago, he had not seen this. There was too much rage in him to notice the polished dark of their eyes, the life that flowed there, or the errant threads in their handmade shawls.

He had delivered himself to Ra’s with his jaw clenched and festering grief. He was a fitful martyr, a foaming dog snarling at his master’s barrel. He can hear Ra’s lips curve upwards in his head.

_‘You were ready.’_

And he has the urge to kneel before the black-eyed man, to crawl to him, clasp his weathered hands, and weep.

 _I’m sorry_ , he wants to plead. _I couldn’t see._

He does none of these things.

The man stares at him for another moment. Bruce’s hands are balled into fists in the pockets of his coat, and he feels each frosty exhale like the tick of a clock. But the man with the black eyes only wraps an arm around his grandson’s shoulders. The boy looks away from Bruce, and then the two rise. They ascend the two steps to their dwelling and shut the door behind them.

 

Bruce leaves the village behind, struggling up the mountain. He can hardly see through his tears. He vomits only twice.

—

When he reaches the peak, he stops to rest. Every breath is mangled and loud, an insult from the thin air to his lungs. He sits down on a rock, not far from the lake where Ra’s told him that the death of Bruce’s parents was Thomas’ fault.

The hole where he fell through the ice has long since frozen over. He is embarrassed that a part of him thought it would still be there.

 _‘Bruce Wayne_ would _think the world retains its shape for him,’_ Ra’s says, _‘that a natural phenomenon would arise from nothing just to preserve the proof of his existence.’_

“Yeah, well,” Bruce fights against the scarcity of oxygen, “at least I didn’t think I _was_ a natural phenomenon.”

_‘Didn’t you, though?’_

Some of the monastery had been rebuilt after the fire. Bruce runs a hand over the freshly painted wood of a support column. Steps over the charred remains of the old. Part of him wants to destroy it again. Set the entire edifice ablaze. To laugh into the mouth of the yawning flames and scream into the sky, _‘How’s_ this _for proof of existence?’_

Maybe he wants to carve his face up too. Maybe he always did.

And that is why he is here.

—

There are all manner of candles in varying states of life upon the crude altar in the bowels of the monastery. Some are brand new, with virgin wicks not yet licked by a fire, and some are no more than melted hills, their entrails spilling heedlessly down the sides of the table. It’s all so fitting. Bruce wonders if the candles are made in the village in the foothills. He knows they are.

A sudden image of Alfred comes to him. Wiping his hands on a cloth and looking at Bruce with the same expression the black-eyed man had given him.

Bruce lowers himself to sit cross-legged before the altar. He closes his eyes as if years have taken him back, and he is training with Ra’s and the League, learning to control his breathing. To feel the shift of movement in the air around him with nothing more than the hair on the back of his neck. And he does feel it.

“I don’t like knowing that we have the same old friends,” Bruce says, eyes still closed, mouth gentle. Toying around a smile. “I don’t like that I had enough spare time to find out where you were.”

“Hm.” Bruce hears him swallow more than he hears the hum. He’s so used to having the echo of Ra’s in his head that the volume of a real living voice almost scares him. And this one is still so gratingly familiar. “You know… there’s a difference between spare time and, ah, _borrowed time_.”

Bruce lifts an eyebrow and exhales. “You would know.”

There’s a gloved hand guiding his chin to the right and Bruce opens his eyes. He does not recognize the face in front of him.

“We both would.” But he recognizes the red tongue that darts out over naked lips. The mounds of scars around the mouth. “We _both_ would.”

Bruce just stares at him. Neither of them is wearing their true face, and it’s unsettling in a way that Bruce is not prepared for. He had told himself he wanted to die alone. But he had come here anyway.

The light of the candles and the white air outside flicker in Bruce’s eyes, and the skin around them creases with something genuine. A starched smile, but one beaten senseless. “Maybe I _am_ like a salmon.”

And the Joker laughs. Laughs. And laughs.

—

The next morning, Bruce untangles himself from a woolen blanket and it feels almost like he is back in the manor. As if the bomb had gone off and he’d returned to Gotham quietly, easing into retirement. Or maybe absconding with Selina.

But no. He is still here, in the reconstructed rooms of the monastery, surrounded by the white fangs of the Himalayas. He pads barefoot down the stairs, coddled by the warmth of the fire crackling in the sanctum’s hearth. And then he pauses mid-step, like a cautious doe.

“Hey now, that’s not fair. I didn’t bring the cowl.”

The Joker looks at him over a bowl of oatmeal, face newly painted, hair vivid with dye. He’s using an old shipping crate as a table. “That’s, uh, hm… _not my problem_.”

Bruce is already rifling through sacks and boxes. His heart is pounding in his chest like an ensnared bird over the revelation. The absolute most obvious fact: the Joker _eats_. He eats too.

“I don’t suppose you have any coffee?” Bruce asks in a tone reserved for inquiring with Lucius about board room meetings.

The Joker slurps another spoonful of oatmeal while pointing to a burlap bag in a corner near the staircase.

Bruce goes to it and scoops out the grounds and he feels the pin-sharp eyes in his back as he prepares the kettle over the hearth. After he’s seated on the floor, mug wrapped in his cold hands, sipping, there’s a crack of chair legs as the Joker leans back. He pretends to yawn and then throws the oatmeal-coated spoon against the wall. “You know _what_?”

Bruce takes another sip of coffee. It’s bitter and coarse and it very nearly tastes like the mountains themselves. Like the prayer flags in the village in the foothills.

The Joker licks his lips, tilting his head. “I saw this bird the other day. Beautiful. Just…” He stirs a gloved hand through the air. “ _Beautiful_. Red. Bright red. Its whole body, ah, like a ruby.”

Bruce’s intrigue is palpable. “Was it about the size of a tangerine?”

The Joker makes a popping sound with his lips. His voice is something between a snarl and a whisper. “ _Sure_.”

 

Bruce sorts through his climbing gear, adds to his layers of clothing. He fills one bag entirely with peppered jerky. _Protein_ , he tells himself like a mantra. _Energy._

He still has an oxygen mask he once used as Batman, and he stuffs that in a bag too.

He descends the stairs again. He’s wearing a mouthpiece that covers the lower half of his face—a discarded portion of an early make of the batsuit—to protect himself from windburn. “Where did you last see it?”

“Ah, what?” The Joker looks at him as though Bruce is interrupting an important business transaction.

“The bird.”

“Oh, _right_.” His tongue clicks against the ‘t’. He nods his head to the east. “That way.”

“Thanks.” Bruce ducks his face as he heads out. The Joker looks like he’s about to laugh, but he doesn’t.

—

Bruce traverses the mountains all day. He finds one peculiarly shaped chasm and rappels down into it. The strained light from the sun reaches out for his face, but the darkness of the cave itself bristles up against him, close. As though it knows him.

There is a small lake here. He dips his fingers into the frigid water and drinks from it, his hands burning. He notes the moon-like shivers that flash through the water. Tiny fish that have found a way to live in this subterranean grave.

“Just think, Alfred,” he says to the cave, “what we could’ve done with this place.”

On the way back to the monastery, after lifting himself from the chasm’s mouth, he loses his footing on an outcropping and slices his hand open in an effort to regain it. He presses his mouth to the wound, sucks at it, and then wraps it tightly with his scarf.

It is almost nightfall when he returns to the temple. The Joker is tampering with some kind of device, but Bruce doesn’t register what it is. What he does register, however, is the way his hawk-like eyes hone in on Bruce’s mouth. The blood smeared there. The shape it makes.

 

Bruce locks the door to his room that night.

—

A few days later, they eat breakfast together. Or rather, Bruce eats a bowl of turnip leaves and dried yak meat and watches the Joker peruse a Gotham newspaper, muttering at some pages and ripping out others. From across the table, Bruce can smell the distinct and almost animalic odor of opium.

“Where did you get this?” Bruce nods at the paper.

The Joker flicks at the ear of the page he’s holding with his thumb and sighs. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been here?”

“Yes,” Bruce says brightly, smacking as he chews.

“I’ve been here since _right_ before your, uh, muzzled linebacker friend turned Gotham into his very own private island.” The Joker twists up his mouth, making a chirping noise. “How do you _think_ I got it?”

“My old friends.” Bruce says it like he’s a kid with the right answer to a test question.

“ _Your old friends_ ,” the Joker repeats with a sneer.

“You know,” Bruce says carefully, “I’m surprised you left when you did. Bane’s whole M.O. just seems like something you would’ve appreciated.”

“ _Ah_.” The Joker sucks on his lower lip. He combs back his hair and folds his hands over the paper. “‘ _Giving power back to the people_ ’? That’s the kind of slogan people like Maroni use when they, ha, run for public office. I wasn’t even _there_ and, uh, I know… _exactly_ how they played their little game. After all, I set up the board. I gave them their star playing piece. I gave them _Harvey_. But they… they didn’t know how to _use_ him. And what good is a nail when you’re just going to blow up the whole house?”

“So you _were_ interested?” Bruce presses him.

“I was more interested,” he pauses, “in the, uh, bill from your chiropractor.”

He laughs softly and goes back to the paper.

Bruce pushes chunks of meat around with the wooden spoon and then looks up again. Smirking. “Does it say anything about me?”

And then, from almost-domesticated quiet comes a flurry of metal, and the Joker is reaching across the table, yanking Bruce in by the collar and teasing his throat with a knife. “Don’t make me, ha… ah _ha_ , have to show you how I got these scars.”

Bruce’s elbow is settled in the cooked leaves. “Can you promise me something?”

“Well, uh, if you like _lies_ ,” he licks his lips again, “I can promise you _anything_.”

“When I’m ready to die,” he starts, mapping out the cracks in the Joker’s face paint, “can you take me out to the lake and hold me under?”

The Joker looks up at the ceiling and sucks his teeth in mock consideration. “Uh, no. _No_.”

“Why not?” And Bruce is almost angry.

“Well, for one, it’s too easy.” The Joker moves the knife, stroking the thin skin on Bruce’s neck with its point. “It’s _boring_. And you’re not boring, are you, Brucie?”

“I don’t—”

“No, you’re _not_.” A click on the ‘t’ again. “See, you wanna die like that so that you can die the way your daddy died. Without a fight. On the, ah, _path of least resistance_.”

“I don’t know what Falcone or any of the League told you,” Bruce growls, edging closer, “but my father did everything he could. He was murdered for some crumpled up cash. He died protecting—”

The Joker’s swaying. Like they’re dancing. “So, uh… one out of three was good enough for him?”

“ _WHAT WAS HE SUPPOSED TO DO?_ ” Bruce can’t tell if the roar is in his voice or his own blood, but he is full across the crate now, throttling the Joker. The knife slips from the gloved hand and makes a sloppy line down Bruce’s neck.

The Joker howls with what little breath he has left. His mouth is as wide and dark as the chasm and wheezing laughter bubbles forth even as Bruce’s grip tightens. Bruce almost kills him. The Joker’s throat is so strained that his breath is no more than a rattle, and his coughing is pierced by a high whistling noise.

“He was _scared_ ,” the Joker says finally, on the end of a pant. He’s sprawled on the floor, green hair fanning out around his head like a crown. His voice comes back slowly. “And you want _so badly_ to be scared. You wanna know… that there’s one more thing out there. One more thing in the night that will terrify you so much that you’ll plead for your life. Bargain… with everything you have. That you’ll, ha ha, wish you were dead. You wanna die believing that whatever killed you… wasn’t _you_.”

Bruce feels the distinct weight in every ounce of his own body. He doesn’t speak. He only stands, pushes his bowl to the side, and heads upstairs to collect his gear for the mountains.

 

When he returns to the hearth, the Joker is gone. Bruce still slams the door behind him as hard as he can. He doesn’t wander the mountains that day. He sits out on the lake and wishes he hadn’t crawled out when Ra’s sent him under the ice. He wishes he had killed Ra’s. He imagines he would have laughed as he’d done it.

—

The Joker has been gone for three days. Bruce barely notices. The silence in his absence feels like the silence on the slopes surrounding the village. He’s started taking bourbon in his coffee and in a flask with him on the mountains. It warms him up when he starts hiking. It thins his blood and it’s just dangerous enough that he has to guess if he’ll be sober enough to make it back to the monastery alive.

This time he passes the chasm in the opposite direction and finds a manageable yet narrow path down around the other side of the mountain, away from the village. The air warms and the snow retreats into the gold grass of the foothills. He finds blue flowers growing here as well. He picks one. Two.

The silence follows him, and the wind does not interrupt. Bruce closes his eyes, feels the bourbon cotton down his throat. The sky is clear, so he practices sensing the passage of time by the way sun spots move along the insides of his eyelids. He drinks until he blacks out.

 

The biting wind against his face wakes him up to a bone-white night, the moon ripe like hanging fruit overhead. There is a huffing sound like breath from beyond his shoulder and Bruce staggers to his feet.

He laughs. “I thought I was supposed to come after you.”

There is no answer.

Bruce turns around, and what stands there has no need or grasp of his words. Its curling horns are outlined grey in the moon on one side, black on the other where the shadow’s thrown. The tahr snorts softly. Its breath comes in clouds.

In the night, with the bourbon in his blood, Bruce isn’t sure if it’s real. He takes a step towards it, but it bobs its head and stamps at the ground. The rut is in full swing.

Bruce takes another step and the animal snorts again, digging in its hooves. He keeps edging forward, holding out his hand. It’s trembling.

The tahr goes still as water. It looks at him with eyes dark as the dead, and Bruce knows that gaze. They stand there for a minute more. It feels like an hour, with only the air between them. Then Bruce lurches forward, and the tahr rises up on its hind legs. He feels only a fraction of the solid blow to his chest as he falls, the wind knocked from his lungs, and he looks back at the world upside-down around him. He watches the tahr lope into the shadows, the only point of life on the foothills, until it is gone.

—

Bruce does not make it back to the monastery until morning. His throat is dry and stripped raw with bile, his body is numb, and his chest throbs. When he heats the water and removes his clothes, he finds dark purple bruises spreading there. The blue flowers spill from his coat as he throws it to the floor.

He lays one on the crate table downstairs, and grinds the other into a powder.

It is seventy-six hours before he sees the light of day again.

—

He stumbles on the stairs on his way down, slamming his chest into the railing. He groans, holding himself there as his eyes adjust to the winter sun. Miles away, he hears a gunshot.

The blue flower he left on the crate three days ago is gone. In its place are a metallic device and a note scrawled in red ink.

 

_You really should learn to smile more_

_You’re not exactly “radiating” joy_

_Ha. Ha. Ha._

Bruce picks up the modified dosimeter and smashes it against the wall. He dry heaves on the floor beside it until his lungs are burning, and his rage still isn’t spent. So he takes an earthenware mug and shatters it over the wooden altar. Every breath is like inhaling fiberglass.

He starts laughing. It tears through his gut and rises up into his chest where the bruises spread. It leaves his throat uncontrollably, just like the bile.

A fit of sobbing quakes through him. “Alfred…”

And he opens his mouth, wide, pulling at the corner of his lips with one finger and taking the ceramic shard in his other hand. He wants to shut his eyes, but he wills them open. A thought occurs to him as his body trembles.

_Why would you burn down a forest looking for a tangerine?_

He drags the shard through the side of his mouth. The blood immediately gets in the way. He feels the wound with one finger and knows it’s less than a centimeter, not deep enough. The newly torn flaps of skin are slick with ooze and blood and saliva, and he can’t hold them back properly. Several times he cuts a new line as the shard slips. His frustration grows with each mistake, and nearly two inches deep into one side of his mouth, he pushes too hard, and drives the shard down into his gums.

The sound he makes is threefold between a hiss, a whimper, and a scream. He throws down the piece of ceramic and clamps his hands over his mouth, tipping his head back and swallowing the blood.

He doesn’t remember ending up on the floor, but when his tongue lashes out over raw nerve endings, he sees stars on the ceiling. He sees a red shape. And then nothing.

—

It is dark when he opens his eyes. The fire in the hearth cracks over new logs, and the candles on the altar have been lit again. The air smells fragrant, thick with clean smoke. Ylang ylang and frankincense.

“Do _you_ …” The Joker sits a few feet from him, near the hearth, tapping a stick of incense in the burner. A deck of playing cards is arranged between them, and he’s not wearing any makeup. His lips are pursed around the sound of ‘u’. “…have any _threes_?”

Bruce sits up. His mouth is packed full of gauze and tastes like petroleum jelly. He touches his cheek and finds it taped up, but he can feel the sharp bumps of the stitches underneath. He starts to speak, but drools around the gauze, so he gingerly pulls some of it out.

“Why doesn’t it hurt?” He’s still rubbing his face. His voice is wrong.

“That,” the Joker holds up a small bottle, “would be the penicillin. Can’t you _taste_ _it_?”

His tongue punctures every ‘t’.

“Why the incense? My head is so foggy.”

“Uh, yeah, you’re, uh…” The Joker rakes his fingers through flaxen hair, fluffing it out, scratching his scalp. “You’re gonna want that in about twenty minutes.”

“How does it look?” Bruce tilts his face from side to side as if looking into a mirror.

Even as the fire from the hearth casts a shadow over the Joker, Bruce sees his eyes go dark.

“ _Don’t_.” He points a gloved finger at him patiently, but his voice is restraint. “Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t try… to be like me.” He shakes his head and his mouth forms an ‘o’. “You’re _not_. And I wouldn’t like you if you _were_.”

“Well,” Bruce tries to smile, flinching severely as he does it, as if he were trotting out his newest girls at one of his fancy hotels, “they say imitation is the highest form of flattery.”

“And I _hate_ being flattered. Threes?”

“Go fish.” Bruce peeks at his hand. He really doesn’t have any threes. But the admonishment sticks, into his skin like a bur. “Isn’t that what this was all about though? You and me? Weren’t you always trying to prove that deep down I’m really just like you?”

“ _Batman_.” The Joker draws a card. “That’s a game for Batman. And you’re not Batman. Not here. Because if you _were_ Batman…” He nods toward the broken dosimeter, “you wouldn’t be _here_.”

For the first time since arriving in the foothills, Bruce understands. He swallows around a knot in his throat and nausea gurgles in the pit of his stomach. The Joker is wearing the blue flower in his waistcoat pocket.

“I can’t go back.” He looks into the face across from him, one he has seen so many times and yet only once before. “Gordon and Blake… I trust them. And Lucius never needed me to know what to do. Gotham’s safer because I’m not in it.”

“No, _no_.” The Joker corrects again. “Gotham’s safer because _we’re_ not in it.”

Bruce huffs out an attempt at a laugh, but winces and settles for a tight smile. He feels warm, and not only for all the firelight and penicillin. “Got any sevens?”

—

The wound in his mouth heals slowly and painfully. The packing is the worst of it, cleaning the pus, and Bruce is sure he’s formed a mild addiction to penicillin after dousing all his fresh gauze in it.

He still goes out into the mountains, and sometimes in the dead of night a few boxes of supplies from Wayne Enterprises are airdropped to the monastery. But he does not think of returning to Gotham. He starts a letter to Alfred, but doesn’t finish it. He touches his cheek.

—

On a trip to the village in the foothills to buy grain and red chilies, he notices dark clouds far off to the south. A sudden wind, too warm for winter, blows through his hair and his shawl. There is a shuddering sound within it, a sound he thinks he remembers from childhood. A cold sweat forms on his brow.

He feels immovable, but he takes a step and stumbles in the stone street. The natives hardly stop to wonder at him—he is nothing new—but he feels eyes upon him.

And he turns, to the mouth of a dark alley beside a painted door, and framed within it is the black-eyed man and a face that has remained in his nightmares for close to a decade.

The Joker looks at Bruce as someone might look at a man waiting in line for the gallows. His unpainted mouth is a thin line, and Bruce sees so much contempt flaring in his eyes. The strange wind ripples through his woolen scarf, his undyed hair.

Those eyes count silently, like a hunter allowing a buck to get a head start. Bruce realizes it was not a gunshot he had heard in the mountains.

For the first time since returning, he wishes he had not come to this place.

Back at the monastery, he pulls out the black gauntlets, runs his fingers over the fin-like blades. He thinks of Gotham.

 

That day he waits for the Joker to return from the foothills. He drags him out onto the lake when he does.

“I meant to ask…” The words float up between grinning teeth. “Did you ever find that bird?”

Bruce punches him. The gauntlet’s blades make neat red lines through his face. Batman would say something. Batman would know what was happening. But Bruce doesn’t know, so he lets his fist fall like a hammer.

The laughter heightens to barking madness. Bruce sees red. His stitches whine.

—

One morning he is looking through the burlap sacks of coffee when he notices a large leather bag like a mail satchel. He’s never seen it before.

He unstrings it, and when it opens, dirt spills over the wooden floor. Bruce scoops up a handful and examines it. He can tell by the silt deposits that it’s from Gotham, from near the bay. A sharp metallic odor. The soil is mixed with thermite.

He digs further into the bag. He finds hundreds upon hundreds of rolled up papers—copies of GCPD personnel files. Criminal records of associates in the DA’s office. Bottles of potassium iodide. His hand reaches around a manila folder that has remained intact. There is a large heart smeared over it in dried red paint. Not paint.

Bruce opens the file. His mouth closes around a name. A name he knows, but one he had not known before.

_Did you ever find that bird?_

He claws through the dirt as if his life depends on it, and finally his fingers close around a crumpled piece of cardstock. He knows before he pulls it out.

It is a photo of him and his parents.

He flips it over. The words are scribbled in a too-familiar hand.

 

_How much dirt can one man wipe away?_

His blood feels like it’s boiling. Like it will simply vaporize the poison with its heat. He needs to call Lucius.

He does not.

—

It is a game. He understands it, and he knows he’s playing his part like he’s meant to, but he drives himself forward anyway. He knows the bag was left for him to find that very day because it is weeks before he sees the Joker again.

He tears out his stitches. He stalks the monastery. He begins drafting a new suit.

—

It is in the late dying hours of night when Bruce comes to the village. When he sees him again. The man he is speaking to is decidedly not native. He is pale and dressed in a finely pressed suit. Even from the alley across the road, Bruce can smell the reek of old money.

The moon bends a new shadow over the roof above him.

Bruce looks up. Two black eyes hover in a white cordate face. A barn owl looks down at him.

 

When the man falls dead, stabbed by a switchblade concealed in a purple sleeve, Bruce slams the Joker up against the wall of the opposite alley. His face is painted. The blue flower is still in his waistcoat pocket.

“We were just _talking_.” His red mouth opens into a void as he croons. “No need to get so possessive.”

“Who was he?” Bruce’s voice is guttural in a way he only vaguely remembers.

“Ooh, you _would_ like to know, wouldn’t you?” An old taunt. “Why don’t you come back with me and find out?”

“No,” Bruce says, and the voice is his own. “I already told you I’m not going back. Neither are you. We can play this game in hell. Gotham doesn’t deserve it.”

Moonlight passes over the Joker’s ghostly face, and his black eyes seem almost soft. He runs his gloved fingertips up and down Bruce’s forearms. Bruce loosens his hold. Wants to close his eyes. The Joker knees him in the groin. Kicks him in the chest as he tumbles to the ground, in the same place the tahr had planted its horns. Kicks him again. Then he drags Bruce up against the stone, and Bruce is again surprised at how strong he really is. For a moment, they just pant. There is fresh blood on Bruce’s face from where his unhealed wound caught on the rock.

The Joker holds a razor to the infantile line of scar tissue. “What if I told you… that my little ‘ferry experiment’ wasn’t quite over? That, ah, customer satisfaction in Gotham is—and this is truly shocking—at an all-time _low_?”

“What do you mean?” Bruce wants to growl out the question, he is seething, but exhaustion overtakes him and it comes out more like a harsh whisper.

“You see… they’re just _little birds_. There’s a whole _flock_ of them. They have this ‘perfect order’, and as soon as there’s so much as a  _hair_ —or should I say, _feather_ —out of place…” He presses the blade closer, “…they _scramble_. They don’t know what to do, so they try to fight disorder… with money. But what they don’t realize is… the _other_ birds—the ones on food stamps, the ones crushed by Bane’s little army, the ones Batman _ignores_ —they’re sick of money. And now they know the one thing they were never supposed to: that complacency… is just. Like. _Death_.”

Bruce looks for the owl, but it is gone. The Joker removes the razor and presses their foreheads together. “And you made them. You set a precedent. _You_... are their beacon of justice.”

“I don’t care.”

“Yes, you do.” The Joker eyes him closely. He pulls out the folded sheet of drafting paper in Bruce’s coat pocket and holds it up. “You really do.”

Bruce says nothing for a long time, but a fever passes through him in the wind. It gets into his bones and his ears and he feels like laughing. “I hear birdwatching is better in the spring.”

—

March is almost upon the slopes, and the wind finds its way to the peaks. It smells like salt and iron. There is a storm moving in from the south. The silence stays. He finds the new asymmetry of his mouth somehow comforting, and he’s designed the updated suit to accommodate it. He can hear Lucius’ frown through the phone when he tells him the tabloids are going to be disappointed.

Later he calls Alfred. He hears the thickness in the older man’s voice as he says his name. When Bruce asks if he can speak to Blake, there’s a pause.

“Sorry, Master Wayne. He’s sleeping quite soundly. Be a shame to wake him.”

“Isn’t it…” Bruce checks the global clock, “isn’t it almost 4pm there?”

“It is, sir.” Bruce’s heart aches at the pride in his voice. The knowing smile. “It is indeed.”

—

They sit upon the ice of the lake. No cowl, no makeup. Bruce wonders how far away this mountain is from Kula Kangri. He plans to climb it before he leaves, to find out if blue flowers grow there too. If there’s another monastery, another snarling boy who’s starved of suffering.

“When we get back to Gotham, nothing will change.” Bruce feels like the hunter now.

“That’s…” The Joker sighs. “That’s the _point_.”

“Were you disappointed?” He asks. “When you found out it was me?”

“If I were disappointed… I wouldn’t be here,” the Joker licks his teeth, “and you would be dead.”

“You can just say no.”

“ _No_.”

“How long do you think we’ll survive?”

“Ooh,” the Joker scrunches up his face, “I don’t think that far ahead. Things are better when they… just _happen_. It’s when you start planning every little detail that, ha, they start to go wrong.”

Bruce touches the scar. It is then that the Joker reaches out, taking his face in gloved hands. Shushing him. Bruce studies his dark eyes. He isn’t sure if it’s the lack of makeup or something else that makes the light in them reflect differently. The wind from the south picks up, whipping through their clothes. The Joker leans in, hair whispering over Bruce’s cheek, and kisses the wound. His mouth is softer than it deserves to be.

Ra’s had told him once that Bruce had poison in his veins. At the time, it was a metaphor. But from somewhere in hell, Bruce is sure the man is laughing at him. He wants to laugh back, but can’t muster the humor.

So the Joker does it for him. He rests his unpainted face against Bruce’s neck, a hand on his chest where bruises once were, and trembles with manic glee. Bruce can feel the warmth of his breath, his mouth, on his throat. He can taste the salt in the air.

 

Night begins to settle in, like dust on a mantelpiece. The storm approaches. The sun dips below it, impaled on the mountains. The whole world turns red.

The wind writhes. In it, Bruce hears the shuddering of thousands upon thousands. They’ve followed him.

They always do.

—

One morning, the Joker is gone. Bruce knows he will never see him again in this place. There is a missed call from Alfred.

Bruce stands outside in the snow. He thinks the Joker always knew what he would do with the thermite. He watches the monastery burn.

He cranes his head back to the sky. Back to the yawning flames. The earth feels both more and less beneath his feet.

And his laughter rises.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments always loved and appreciated.
> 
> tumblr: @ [regalmilk](http://regalmilk.tumblr.com/)


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